Yesterday Richard Roberts --Nobel laureate and OA advocate-- gave the Sixth Annual Daniel Nathans, M.D. Lecture in Molecular Genetics at Johns Hopkins University. Karl Broman liked it:
This afternoon, I went to the best seminar of the year. Sure, it's just January 19, but I'm confident that I won't attend a better seminar this year, as it was among the best I've ever attended....Why did I enjoy the seminar so much? First, [Roberts] began with a bit of a sermon about the importance of open access journals. That if you're anywhere but Hopkins (and a few other places), it's extremely difficult to get access to the literature. He also made the important point that: wouldn't it be great if the entire scientific literature, ever, was accessible online for searching? It's easily within our power. There are so many interesting papers that are languishing in dust. If they could all be online, and if the full text were free for searching, wouldn't everything be so much better? I was completely on his side from the start.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2006 10:39:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
